Part 1, His Early, Middle and Late

Look, here's the latest history of Ted Berrigan. He was born in Tulsa, Rhodeland. Here he wrangled with a strict attention to how they sound, all of them. On each street he sees more guys, and people, and he struggles with temperament. He's just a lad in a groaning place. He learns to pay attention, but you can't buy much with that. Moving to Provider, Oklahoma meant that he was in charge of the next few years of American history. He fought in the war against the naming of other things by the names intended for these things of which we all are said to be familiar with. He got plug ugly with teachers, wrassled on the home team, left some places in a rush. He met Ron Gallup and Dick Padgett. Inside of minute they were fast friends, tho nowhere near the record. The record began with Motown beat, familiar and yet. They moved quickly and suddenly it was New York, honest. Have you fucking seen New York? It's like one grand toaster oven. Each piece of white bread you stick in that oven, it becomes its inner piece of toast. Same possibly could work for whole wheat, rye and other sorts of bread type conveyances but that resides out of the purview of this study. We're at the point when the story gets exciting. Here goes, in no particular order: Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Frank O'Hara, Larry Rivers, Anne Waldman, Joe Brainard. Already the list seems old fashioned, but poems used to include them like anything. His kids and all, stories, Pepsi, the choice of generation, etc. then some other stuff, written in that way that says: this is written this way. Then some other means of conveyance, cup, siphon, prodigy, off gold. Then dying in the last expanse. This could have been expected.